Thursday, July 22, 2010

While Brad, Adrian, Akiko, and I were driving around the wooded mountains northeast of Toluca, looking for an obsidian source (which we found! more on this later, I hope), we stopped in at the "Centro Ceremonial Otomi." This is one of the more bizarre built environments I have ever experienced. It is a huge monumental complex built of stone, located in the mountains northeast of Toluca (in the municipio of Temoaya) with a beautiful view down into the Toluca Valley.
The Centro was built in 1980, by Jorge Jiménez Cantú, governor of the State of Mexico. Its purpose was supposedly to provide a tribute to the Otomi peoples of the state. The design seems to have nothing to do with Otomi culture or history, from the pictorial mosaics to the architectural arrangement and elements To me, it looks like the modernist architectural monuments built by 20th century authoritarian regimes (huge monuments that dwarf human visitors, abstract decoration, large open area for ceremony, etc.).

This complex was used in the James Bond flick "License to Kill" as the "Olympatec Meditation Institute" (see photo below).

Residents of Toluca said that at one time there was a museum featuring Otomi culture at the monument, but all we saw was a big empty room. There is a small market with traditional crafts. We didn't see much evidence of Otomi activity at the site, although the Wikipedia entry on Temoaya says that Otomi ceremonies are held regularly at the Centro.

The Centro Ceremonial Otomi is open to tourists, and it houses dormitories for athletes who come to train at the high altitude (more than 3,000 meters ASL).

If I were governor and wanted to do something for the Otomi residents of the state, I'd spend my money on education, health, and jobs. If you want to know more about the Otomi, see some of these sources:

There are a number of documented Otomi sites like Cerro de la Virgen. These would make better models for a modern Otomi monument than the modernist/indigenist fantasy they built. But to be fair, I'm not sure whether any of the Otomi sites had been excavated or understood at the time the Centro Ceremonial Otomi was built.